Thousands of Mac users around the world face a most common Mac data recovery problem, i.e. Data recovery from Inaccessible OS X Hard Drive. Usually after a period of time, Mac hard drive become unreadable or inaccessible due to certain circumstances and many users may not be able to get access to their precious data that were already stored on their OS X hard drives.

Such type of problems might be caused due to system volume corruption, malware attack, file corruption etc. There are 2 different methods to resolve such problems and in this blog post we will explain both of these methods step-by-step.

Ways to regain the accessibility in your Mac hard drive

Corruption in the PRAM or NVRAM may be the cause of drive inaccessibility, and the system fails to boot from the appropriate drive where OS X resides. This can be corrected by resetting the PRAM or NVRAM. Also, the files may become invisible to the internal search engine on Mac viz. Spotlight. This can be corrected by indexing the items again.

1. Resetting PRAM or NVRAM

Parameter Random-Access Memory (PRAM) stores settings that can be easily accessed by OS X. It includes settings for startup disk selection. If the drive on the Mac is inaccessible, restoring these settings may help in gaining the accessibility back. Here’s how to do it:

III. This will restart the system and on the startup sound again, release the keys.

Once these settings are reset, you may need to configure speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection and time zone information again. Select the startup disk as appropriate. In older macs, the PRAM feature is in the form of Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory (NVRAM). NVRAM can be reset following the same steps as listed above.

How to look for inaccessible data through Indexing

Some of the files may simply go missing if their indexing is not properly done. To rebuild the index, follow the steps below:

I. Go to: System Preferences > Spotlight.

II. Choose Privacy tab.

III. Add the media on which the files have gone missing.

IV. Remove the media from Privacy. This rebuilds the index.

Now the files should appear in the Spotlight search or system navigation.

In case if the above mentioned method doesn’t work, then you can take the help of Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery Software for recovering the inaccessible hard drive data.

Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery Software provides support for data recovery from inaccessible hard drive with a Recover CD. This CD is used to boot the inaccessible Mac and perform file recovery on the hard drive. The software provides other useful functionalities like RAW Recovery, Image Creation, Encrypted Recovery, Photo and Video recovery.